Fiona pressed her back against the crumbling wall, listening to the faint shuffle of boots on sand. The last guard ran past the corner, weapon ready, boots dragging, he didn't even see her until it was too late. She stepped forward in a silent blur, one arm looping around his neck. What felt gentle to her was enough to cut off his air. His knees buckled, and she lowered him to the ground like a child being put to bed. To anyone who might pass, it would seem he'd dozed off on watch.
Her eyes fell to the weapon at his side. A sleek, matte-black AK variant—futuristic, yet unmistakably lethal. She slipped the magazine free and turned it over in her hands.
Instinct told her to toss it far into the rubble. Out of sight, out of mind. But something made her pause.
What if I tried…?
She curled her fingers around the cartridge, feeling the cold metal casing press into her palm, even under the gloves of her suit. The new strength in her arms hummed beneath her skin, coiled and eager. She squeezed—slowly, deliberately—until the casing groaned. The sound was soft, almost shy, but it sent a shiver through her. The steel split with a muted snap.
She stared at the broken halves. I can really do this now.
But her gut twisted. That same force, applied to someone's ribs, their skull… She exhaled sharply, throwing the mangled metal away. This wasn't about hurting people—it was about control, about restraint. Some lessons ran deeper than muscle memory.
The guard's radio crackled—voices from deeper inside the compound, furniture scraping against floors. Barricades being built. Time to move.
She slipped through the shadows toward the building's eastern wall, where weathered stones spoke of decades weathering desert storms. Here, where the structure met the natural rock face, a narrow service entrance yawned like a mouth. The tunnel beyond swallowed her in shadow.
Her quantum comm crackled to life in her ear.
"The front be a dead end! I say we loose smoke and fire to stir up a grand distraction! Confusion be the gold that buys us the seconds we need, so let's spend it wisely!"
She froze mid-step, scanning the dim tunnel walls. Shapes emerged from the darkness—scattered bedding, a tin cup, a child's toy. She bent to retrieve it, realizing too late she'd stepped on it while slipping in, snapping one arm from the crude wooden doll. A home. Families lived here.
"No. We're not putting these people in danger. We will find another way."
The hum of ventilation was the only sound between them. The tunnel's dim light cast shadows across the bare concrete walls, each one stretching like bars of a cell. Dision drew a crude map in her helmet's hud, tracing a glowing line toward the cooling system on the east side.
"This here be the coolin' line, high-pressure, see? Punch a hole in it and it'll vent cold vapor straight into the hall. Won't harm a soul, but it'll blind 'em better than a thick fog on the high seas!"
Fiona crouched beside the line, scanning the projection, her eyes darting to the bottleneck between two support columns. "And here's the sensor," she said, tapping the flickering red dot. "We take that out, the alert sends everyone the wrong way—toward the front entrance. Right?"
Dision smirked. "Aye. The landlubbers'll think we're comin' straight on, brazen as a cannonball! But we'll slip in quiet as a whisper from the stern, find the pilot, and be gone 'fore they even know we was there!"
Fiona looked toward the crates piled in the corner—construction tools, half-open boxes of maintenance gear. A crowbar rested on top, still streaked with concrete dust. She wrapped her fingers around the cold steel and felt the weight settle in her hand.
"Ok, here goes."
"Fast and quiet, me lass!"
"I know...!"
She glanced down the empty corridor, the thought of the pilot trapped somewhere ahead tightening her chest.
The air in the tunnel was still and cold, humming faintly with the life-support conduits that ran along the walls. Fiona crouched low, the crowbar's weight warm in her hand.
She glanced up at the thick pipe. One measured swing — clang. A small rupture opened, and instantly the hiss began. White vapor gushed out, curling in ghostly ribbons, then thickening into a rolling cloud that quickly swallowed the tunnel.
"Good," Dision said. "Now for the sensor."
Fiona crossed to the junction box, slipped the crowbar's flat end under its casing, and pried. A quick rip of wires silenced the alert system; no flashing lights, no alarm — just another dead spot on the network. The technicians and fighters would think the trouble was elsewhere.
The fog grew denser, licking the floor, softening the world into silhouettes. It smelled faintly metallic but was safe to breathe — at least for now.
Fiona moved toward the front blast door. Beyond it, fighters waited, tense and armed. She planted her shoulder against the lever, braced, and heaved. Metal groaned. The door swung open a crack — just enough. A spray of gunfire erupted instantly into the smoke, sharp flashes illuminating the haze. Bullets chewed into the far wall, but none toward her.
She was already slipping to the side, hugging the wall. The roar of gunfire behind her masked the sound of her crowbar striking the plaster.
Thunk.
Thunk.
She worked fast, testing the wall's weakness. Every hit was a small prayer that no one would hear past the chaos they themselves had unleashed.
One more blow, and she felt the structure give. Just a little more, and she'd have her way through — straight to the pilot.
The smoke curled through the cracked hallway, not thick enough to choke, but enough to blur shapes into threats. Muffled shouts echoed from beyond the front door. Fiona's pulse kept pace with each shout, each metallic click of a rifle's bolt.
She planted her foot by the wall's base. Kicked. Again. The plaster flaked. The structure didn't budge.
"It's reinforced," Dision's voice came from the suit's interface. "We don't have the power to breach without explosives. We—"
"Explosives will kill everyone in there," Fiona hissed, driving her shoulder into the wall again. Pain flared down her spine. The wall didn't care.
"Then it's over—"
Her knees buckled. For a heartbeat, she almost agreed with him. Smoke bit at her eyes. She could hear the fighters on the other side of the door firing in short, panicked bursts toward the hallway she'd abandoned seconds ago. She wasn't going to make it.
Fiona's breath fogged the cold air before her.
The wall loomed — featureless, unyielding, mocking. She had already tried everything the mind could devise, and everything the body could endure.
Her stance wavered. Her heartbeat stuttered. The last reserves of strength trembled at the edge of exhaustion.
Dision's voice broke through the static in her headset.
"Fiona, the structure's resonance be beyond a proper breach! The probability o' physical success be..."
"I know," she cut in.
Her eyes lowered. Her hands shook. And then—
—the suit awoke.
There was no power up, only memory.
Not her memory. His.
It poured into her: the black void of Boötes, starfields choked by a darkness older than time; Sky's voice silent, his breath ragged in the helmet. The trembling not of fear, but of an entire being fraying at the edges. The moment he had stood before something so immense it seemed to mock the very act of resistance — a horror that language could never hold, only endure.
She felt his tears. His trembling. The fracture in him that would never heal.
But also… the light. The impossible choice: to turn hatred into love, vengeance into forgiveness. To take the road that was not only the hardest, but perhaps the loneliest in all creation.
Her hand closed into a fist. Her anima stirred — reluctant, aching, but alive.
She hated her destiny but she loved her daughter.
And even if her daughter did not love her back, that love was the only weapon she would raise.
The stance came to her without thought — a confluence of every lesson drilled by sensei Leonardo who refused to pity her. Spine aligned, shoulders relaxed, hips grounded.
It was not brute force she summoned, but centuries of discipline; not the chaos of rage, but the poise to let the chaos pass through her and emerge as purpose.
The wall before her was no longer stone, metal, or energy — it was the embodiment of all the years she had been told "no."
Her knuckles split as the anima burst forth — in the smokeless fire that belongs to the soul.
The impact cracked the silence as much as it did the wall. Shockwaves sent fighters to the ground, gasping for air as the dust thinned.
Fiona stepped through the breach.
On the other side, an old woman lifted her gaze, eyes wide, voice breaking in disbelief.
"Jinn…"
And then the woman crumpled into unconsciousness, the word still trembling in the air.
Fiona's anima still hummed through her limbs, the echo of the poised strike she had never delivered. The discipline to hold back—harder than the act itself—was what Sensei Leonardo had carved into her. Now, the burst of power became something else: strength to carry, not to destroy.
Viper's breath came in sharp bursts, like a runner who'd sprinted beyond her limit. She was a soldier, trained to withstand chaos, but the figure lifting her now was not a comrade, nor a known enemy—it was something other. A humanoid silhouette wrapped in alien light and shadow, moving with a precision no battlefield had taught. The contact was careful, as if Viper were fragile glass.
Fiona shifted her weight, hoisting Viper over her shoulders in the clean, practiced motion Sergeant Ashby had drilled into her until her muscles obeyed without thought. She remembered Sagar wading through a wall of flame, carrying bodies with that same unshakable steadiness.
Beyond the smoke and tremors of the tunnel, in a shallow cavern where the air tasted cleaner, Fiona saw them—a mother and her child, pressed together against the wall. The child's wide eyes locked onto her.
For an instant, the battlefield fell away. In those eyes, Fiona was not a soldier, not an enemy, not a rescuer in alien armor—she was the figure from the boy's stories, the one who stood between the world and the dark. He watched as she did not strike down the fighters still groaning on the floor, nor the old woman who had stood in her way, and as she bore an enemy soldier out of danger as if she were a sister-in-arms.
And so she walked past them, carrying Viper and a quiet message: that mercy is not a banner of sides, but a language older than war.
The cacophony of battle still roared through the tunnels, but its fury had shifted elsewhere. Fighters surged toward the distant corridors where they thought the enemy's advance was ensured; technicians scrambled with frantic precision, sealing breaches, patching conduits, and shouting coordinates into headsets. The air was thick with the smell of scorched alloy and the acrid tang of propellant, a stifling curtain that masked smaller movements in its folds.
Through this chaos, Fiona walked as though she carried the weight of a temple relic rather than the slumped form of Viper. The woman's breathing was shallow, her head lolling against Fiona's shoulder, eyes half-open in that uneasy space between trust and dread.
They passed the gaping arch of the exit hatch. There, sprawled like a toppled colossus, lay the Goliath — its armored plates warped and rent, one arm twisted at an unnatural angle. It was not a corpse, Fiona thought, but a sleeping giant, a misunderstood sentinel abandoned in the tide of war.
Without breaking stride, she shifted Viper's weight to one arm, stooped, and caught the machine by its remaining leg. The metal groaned, a long, low note that seemed to echo down the tunnel — yet went unnoticed amidst the artillery's thunder and the shouts of men.
She dragged it behind her, step by step, the burden of flesh and iron swaying with her movements. Not as a trophy, but as a question — If Dision was a friend… could not these too become friends? Could war-born titans be taught peace?
Viper stirred, catching sight of the inert Goliath bumping along the tunnel floor. A flicker of alarm passed across her features, sharper than any pain, but she said nothing. Words would come later. For now, the silence walked between them like a fourth companion.
The tunnel air was heavy with grit and the acrid tang of scorched metal. Behind them, the fighters and technicians were locked on the other passages, sealing breaches and holding the line. No one was watching this way.
Fiona stepped out into the sunrise light, Viper still unsteady.
The goliath's armor flaked with salt and rust, optics dark. The metal shrieked faintly against the sand, but still, no one turned.
Inside her ear, Dision's voice came like a breeze through static.
"The AI core be gone. Its drives rotted away in the sands ages ago. Naught but a cold shell remains."
She frowned, pausing.
"And you?"
"I can take the helm o' its carcass! Not as its original soul, mind ye, but as an extension o' me own being. 'Tis bound by a short tether, a few mere miles from the Caelestis, but by the stars, it will walk!"
The Goliath's optics flared to life in cold blue, joints groaning as dormant servos twitched under new command. Viper stiffened, eyes widening.
"You're letting that… thing come with us?" she hissed.
Fiona didn't answer, just kept dragging until the machine shifted its weight and walked beside her under its own power.
"If Dision can be my friend," she said at last, "maybe these war machines can learn peace too."
They crested the ridge, the Caelestis gleaming inside the wadi like a promise against the pale horizon. But before she could exhale, Dision spoke again.
"While ye lasses make yer way to safety... I'll see to the other pilot meself."
Viper stopped breathing for a second.
Her gaze darted between Fiona and the Goliath.
And for the first time since they'd met, Viper didn't know if this woman's strange world was madness… or the only sane thing left.